The Future Of Rich Media Online Advertising

There is currently a huge shift happening in the manner that Rich Media advertising is being approached. The swing is happening due to technological developments that are being driven by innovation and new ways of thinking about advertising online as a whole. At this current stage in the progression I am going to call this new order - Dynamic Adverts - although I'm sure once it finds its feet that a name will declare itself.

Currently Creative Agencies and Media Agencies are having to create multiple variants of adverts depending on language, video, text, text changes and various other factors. In the past the best way to deal with this was to use XML (or even better some sort of chain of XML) but everyone learnt very quickly that this can have issues. Firstly the servers the XML needs to be on must be so robust it is rare that anyone except the large companies could host them without the server crashing due to the amounts of requests. So therefore the XML was ultimately not as quickly up datable as people would have liked. Then there is the ability to pull in dynamic content on RSS feeds so that the updates would happen without any work required to the advert.

The way the industry is currently moving is into the realms of Dynamic Adverts. This in simplest terms means that an advert could be created that is in essence a shell with all the content ready to be pulled into it. You can then set up as much text, video, images and audio as you want and reference which ones you want to use. It is then possible to swap all the elements of the advert over at the touch of a button (with acceptance from the client, media agency and creative agency if required of course!). This then makes all creatives instantly up dateable whether it is a simple price change, date change or if the entire video has been re-shot and re-edited. It also gets rid of the need to re-make the creative again for this change or for sites to re-test anything as technically it already works.

This then opens up whole new ideas in terms of booking and buying media space and planning campaigns that will run for much longer terms but are still optimisable and updateable during the lifespan of the campaign. For example I could soon see media space being bought in big bulk deals over the space of a few years and then being resold for more money, actually becoming investable space. You buy with the plan to fill the slots and then if they are not getting the desired results, sell the space on for profit. It also means that you can leave the ad tag in the page for a long period of time and the sites need to traffic far less saving them time and money.

Ultimately it means that advertising becomes far less transient and yet more so all in one step, you get the opportunity to use it as you wish rather than being confined by others. You can also start planning much better combined camapigns and swapping elements around to test them and see what gets the best results. Of course everything is completely trackable and so you can see what works best in all areas of your camapign.

Ultimately the whole process of advertising online will change but hopefully away from the more laborious tasks and into giving everyone more time to think about better targetting, niche marketing and inventive ways to utilise the medium. This will be especially true for Creative Agencies as it will allow them much more time in the thinking stages rather than the making stages. Also they can plan to update as more content arises. This should lead to a huge step up in the online advertising world from all apsects and finally a far better grade of creative setting the benchmark.